Study Finds That Young People Aren’t Post-Racial

A new report from the Applied Research Center found that a majority of young people understand that race continues to play a significant role in education, the criminal justice system, immigration, employment and other sectors of society.

TheGrio.com writer David A. Love analyzes the “millennial attitude,” positing that the youth don’t really understand how racism works in America– a result of the public schools, he says, who are “failing to educate students” on it’s significance:

Typically, millenials discuss racism in interpersonal terms — as something occurring between individuals, such as discrimination based on color, or stereotypes — as opposed to describing it as a system-wide problem that implicates entire societal institutions. While most white young people believe racism is an intentional act taking place between individual people, millenials of color will readily label a system as racist, even as they articulate racism in person-to-person terms. In contrast, those millenials with special education or training in racial issues view racism as systemic.

The potency of racism never was in the ability of a lone white bigot to wear a white sheet, fly a Confederate flag and call black people out their name. Real racism involves structures of power, not mere personal encounters, that breed inequality among racial and ethnic groups. Institutional racism does not equate merely with use of the so-called “n-word” or other offensive comments, but rather encompasses a system that moves some people up and others down and out.